


The Radio Is Silent, So Are We

by depressaria



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Community: hc_bingo, Gen, Headaches, Hurt/Comfort, Nosebleed, Sam Winchester's Demonic Powers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-06
Updated: 2017-12-06
Packaged: 2019-02-11 09:51:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12932736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/depressaria/pseuds/depressaria
Summary: Years away from it all and he didn’t say a single word when John slid into the driver’s seat and Dean took shotgun, leaving him to fold himself into the backseat which had been getting cramped even before his body insisted on shooting up another couple of inches after he left for Stanford.Instead of just visions, Sam also develops healing abilities. Naturally, this isn’t as helpful as it seems like it should be.





	The Radio Is Silent, So Are We

**Author's Note:**

> For the ‘headaches/migraines’ square on my hc_bingo card. Starts (and diverges) shortly before 1x16. Title from Julie With... by Brian Eno. Hopefully it’s not too obvious where I lost inspiration… 
> 
> Warnings: violence/gore, major character death

It started, as too many crises did, with Dean getting hurt. 

They’d been on a routine salt and burn—because it was always the routine ones where something went horribly wrong—and the ghost had been throwing the two of them around like bowling pins, and then Dean had landed wrong. 

The ghost went up in flames but Dean didn’t get up, and the two of them realized at almost the exact same moment that a rusted old pipe was jutting from Dean’s chest, the blood all-too-rapidly soaking through his shirt. 

They both cursed in voices that didn’t sound like they belonged to them; Sam’s was all tight and bordering on shrill, and Dean’s was wet and clotted-sounding, ending with a sort of gurgling cough that filled his mouth with blood. 

“Fuck,” Dean said again when the cough tapered off. It seemed to take an enormous effort to force the word out of his lungs; it was breathless and clipped and came up accompanied by a mouthful of startlingly bright blood. “Sam—“ 

“No. No, it’s not that bad. It’s—“ 

Except it was happening too fast. Dean was slipping in and out, unable to keep his eyes open, and the blood had graduated from soaking his shirt to soaking through the knees of Sam’s jeans. He knew it was bad first aid, but he also knew it was over, and he couldn’t let Dean die stuck on a pipe like a bug pinned to a card. So he took him by the shoulders and pulled him up and off of the pipe, trying to ignore the hot gush of blood that splattered his shoes as he did so, trying not to think about the fact that Dean’s eyelids didn’t so much as flicker even though it should have been excruciatingly painful. 

He reached out to feel for a pulse, and the second he felt it—thready but still hanging on—a headache slammed into him so hard that he would have fallen if he wasn’t already on his knees. He had time to think _Fuck fuck fuck, Dean cannot die in a flooded basement surrounded by my puke_ before he ralphed, thankfully managing to turn his head enough that none of it got near Dean, and feeling like the biggest asshole in the world anyways. God, he couldn’t even hold his hand while he died without screwing it up. 

By the time he’d finished emptying his stomach of the mediocre kale salad he’d had for dinner, black spots were merrily ping-ponging across his field of vision and the headache had made itself comfortable behind his eyes and was beginning to stretch out to rest its legs on his neck. He turned back to Dean, who he was still holding onto with what must have been a bruising grip, and saw—

—Nothing. 

His chest had been fountaining blood from a hole big enough to toss a baseball through, but now, despite the fact that both of them looked like they’d stumbled onto the set of an Evil Dead movie, there was barely a scratch. No scar tissue, no inflammation, just torn shirt and an abrasion that wouldn’t even need stitches. 

Dean made his not-so-triumphant return to consciousness a moment later, sitting bolt upright, sucking in a rough lungful of air, spitting out a mouthful of blood, and surveying the scene around him with an expression of disbelief. 

“I could have sworn,” he said, frowning, as he peered down at his ruined shirt. 

Sam released his death grip on Dean like he’d been burned. “Me too,” he said, trying not to sound as shaky as he felt. “She threw you pretty hard.” When Dean was still frowning at all the blood chumming the rusty water around them, he added, “I guess all the water made it look worse than it was.” 

“Yeah,” Dean said, still frowning a little. “Yeah, I guess.” He looked over at Sam, too intent, and then his face cleared. “Dude, gross. Your nose is bleeding.” 

~*~*~*~

He spent the ride back to the motel room trying not to hurl again, and trying even harder not to think about… whatever the fuck had just happened. 

It was possible, he supposed, that he’d imagined it. It was a high-stress situation, and it had been dark, and they’d both taken their fair share of knocks during that fight. Maybe Dean had just been hazy from the bump to his head, and Sam had been hazy from being way too worried about him. 

The easy solution was to just not think about it, to accept that Dean was fine and that they’d just gotten lucky for once. Routine salt and burn, routine scare, routine awkward drive home—or to the motel room that was the closest thing they had to one, anyways.

But they were both still damp with metallic-smelling water from the basement, and Dean’s shirt was so torn and bloodied that they’d probably have to burn it at the nearest opportunity, and his head was still pounding. Every time another car passed, its headlights caused a new bolt of pain to knife through his skull and a new wave of nausea to press insistently at the back of his throat. He just couldn’t shake the feeling that something had happened. Like something was messing with them. 

He closed his eyes and rested his head against the window for the rest of the ride, and Dean was either convinced that he had nodded off, or not in the mood for talking, himself. 

When they got back to the room, he flopped facedown onto his bed and told Dean to take the first shower. He was going to end up sleeping in soggy blankets, but something told him that he probably wasn’t going to spend much time sleeping tonight, anyways.

For once, Dean took a quick shower, leaving a polite amount of hot water. He wordlessly tossed a bottle of aspirin at the back of Sam’s head when he emerged from the bathroom, and Sam dutifully popped a couple before rinsing off and changing into dry clothes. 

Told himself, afterwards, when the room was dark and Dean was snoring softly in the next bed and the aspirin was making a valiant but doomed attempt to combat his now fully-fledged migraine, that it was all in his head. That it was just too soon after the rawhead; it seemed logical that monsters and watery basements and unresponsive Dean would bring up unwanted and far too fresh memories. That he was just so keyed up still from the vision crap that he was seeing magic where there was none. That they were both too worried about Dad, and in his case, too angry at Dad. Too busy looking for a reason to be angry at Dad; the typical adolescent railing against the nearest authority figure—you left us, you ruined our lives, you ruined _us_ and Dean doesn’t even know he’s ruined which was the part that hurt the worst—which started to wear a bit thin after months on the road with little to distract from them except more of the shitty life they were saddled with. 

The simplest, and most likely, explanation, was that this was just more of the same. That he was just being a douche, letting his own neuroses get the better of him. 

Reassuring himself of that didn’t help him sleep. 

~*~*~*~

The next morning found them in a diner, Dean working his way doggedly through a stack of blueberry pancakes and Sam halfway through his fifth cup of coffee, untouched scrambled eggs going cold and rubbery on his plate. The headache had faded to manageable levels, dull enough that he couldn’t tell the difference between it and the normal headache he got when he stayed up all night freaking out about whether or not he’d hallucinated the pipe going through Dean’s sternum—he kept hearing the twin cracks of head against concrete and metal through bone, which made him think of Max pulling the trigger and splattering Dean’s brains all over the anonymously beige suburban bedroom wall—and his freakout had, similarly, been replaced by a dull resignation. Another day, another hunt, another instance of Dean cheating death. No big deal. It definitely wouldn’t catch up to them any time soon. 

“You ever gonna eat your eggs?” Dean asked, gesturing with his fork at Sam’s plate. 

“You ever going to eat a vegetable?” But he took a bite of toast to appease him. It was dry, partly because his stomach was rebelling against the aspirin he’d taken first thing in the morning, and partly because the only jam the diner had was raspberry, and it reminded him too much of what Dean’s chest had looked like when he’d pulled him off the pipe that hadn’t actually existed and holy shit, it was way too early to be so melodramatic. 

Seeming satisfied, Dean turned back to the newspaper he’d been perusing. “Something weird going on in Chicago. Girl gets ganked in her locked apartment. Alarm was still on and everything. It’s the second one in two months.” 

“Seems like it might be our kind of gig. You want to check it out?”

“No, I thought we’d let whatever monster it is just continue running rampant. Jesus. Get your head in the game.” 

He thought it would be kind of nasty to say that it was kind of hard to live in the moment after maybe-maybe-not seeing your brother on death’s doorstep again. As far as Dean was concerned, _nothing had happened_ and nothing was going to happen, so stop whining like a girl about crap that didn’t happen and wasn’t _going_ to happen, and move on. Because that was what worked for Dean; Dean was like those fish that had to keep swimming in order to push water over their gills. If he stopped, even for a minute, he’d suffocate under the weight of it all, so he just never stopped long enough to think about it.

At least, that was what Dean liked to tell himself worked for him. 

But his shoes were still damp with the rusty water and with the blood that had splashed over them like vomit—would probably be stained with it, if Dad’s genetics hadn’t imbued both him and Dean with an all-encompassing love for stain-resistant colors in their clothing—and he could still picture the way Dean had looked in that hospital bed after the rawhead, ashen and diminished and resigned. Brains on the Millers’ bedroom wall. They wouldn’t always be able to pull something out of their asses to avert death at the last minute. Maybe that’s what his most recent freakout was all about. Just his brain’s way of telling him that he needed to get his shit together, of reminding him that the worst could happen at literally any possible moment and he needed to be vigilant. 

Finally, with the kind of reluctant dread in his voice usually only heard during discussions of root canals and pregnancy tests, Dean asked, “This isn’t a vision thing, is it? Because if it’s a vision thing, we can go check that out instead.”

“It’s not a vision thing,” Sam said. He hoped to God it wasn’t a vision thing, anyways. But it wasn’t exactly a lie, either; he really hadn’t had a vision. 

Dean scrutinized him for a long moment before turning back to his pancakes. His concern was mildly hilarious; he was the one who’d nearly died. “Okay,” he said, too carefully neutral to sound it. “Then Chicago it is.” 

~*~*~*~

The drive to Chicago was about as awkward as breakfast. Dean was being extra-obnoxious, drumming on the wheel and singing along to the radio at the top of his lungs and repeatedly “accidentally” jabbing Sam in the ribs with his elbow, trying to get an annoyed reaction out of him to reassure himself that everything was normal. On any other day he might snap at him on principle, or at least just to get him to shut up and sit still for five seconds, but he was too tired and it was too hard to be mad at Dean when less than twenty-four hours ago he’d been dying in his arms. 

If Dean tried a new tactic and switched to the 80s/90s nostalgia station, he was going to open the door and fling himself onto the interstate. 

They pulled off at a gas station at midday even though they didn’t need to refuel, and Dean threw a granola bar at his face when he got back to the car. 

“Don’t know if it’s an organic vegan granola bar,” he said conversationally, “But I figured beggars can’t be choosers.”

Sam flipped him the bird and made himself eat the granola bar, which tasted like it’d been sitting on the shelf since before he was born. He felt comfortable chalking that one up to the gas station’s advanced age, rather than his own current… weirdness. 

The headache seemed to have been left back in the diner, which, in another world, might be reassuring. But somehow it didn’t make him feel better, because the thing was that he was pretty sure this had happened before. Not Dean almost dying—that was a sure thing, not a pretty sure thing—but… the thing. 

About a month before… before, he and Jess had been cooking together. She’d been slicing vegetables and had cut her finger pretty bad, and for a second before he rushed over to put pressure on it and get a better look, he’d really thought she’d sliced it right off. She’d still needed stitches, but he’d honestly expected it to be a lot worse than it actually was.

On their way home from the E.R., she told him that she’d thought the same thing. Not in a serious way, like she thought something weird was going on. More in a self-deprecatory way, making fun of herself for being dramatic, trying to defuse the tension of an evening spent in the E.R. with her arm held up over her heart to slow the bleeding. It had still made his stomach drop, made him pull over so he could hold her (careful of her heavily bandaged hand) and kiss her temple. 

Her hair had smelled like antiseptic. He’d had a migraine for the next two days. 

The timing—coinciding with the beginning of his visions of Jess’s death and the emergence of Max’s abilities—was too suspicious. If this was something paranormal happening, there was little chance that there wasn’t something sinister behind it. It was too much to hope that something good could have happened to them, that this time the gift came with no strings attached. Sam saw visions of deaths he couldn’t stop. Max had been given the ability to escape his tormentors only once he had nothing left to do but dig his own grave. He knew there were more people like them out there, and he knew that it was all bad news. Even if one of them did develop powers that were exactly what they needed exactly when they needed, there was no way it came without a catch. 

He just had to figure out what the catch was.

~*~*~*~

They found what was killing people in Chicago, and they found Meg, and they found out what Meg was. 

(God, the scant weight of her in his lap, the smell of blood and sulfur and burnt yarrow, his heart pounding as he tried to saw through his bindings without her noticing. She felt different from Jess, who’d always felt solid and strong, and it wasn’t just because Jess was at least a half a foot taller than Meg. Meg had felt hollowed-out beneath her too-warm skin, like her body was just a husk barely containing the real Meg. Jess’s kisses were always languid and confident, and Meg kissed like she’d just gotten out of prison, hungry and handsy, watching his reaction with eyes that were dead behind a thin veneer of sadism.)

But she was gone, and for once the dark figure in their bedroom wasn’t a monster, but their father. 

~*~*~*~

He didn’t know for sure until after they’d confronted Yellow Eyes and he’d once again disappointed John. 

Dean was in bad shape—you didn’t have to be college-educated to realize that—and he could tell from John’s face that he wasn’t sure either whether or not Dean would make it even if they got to a hospital in time. 

And he wanted to say something about his maybe-powers, because he had to try _something_ but he didn’t know if he could stand the disgust and disappointment on John’s face either way—either disappointment that his kid had been tainted by Yellow Eyes worse than he’d thought, or disappointment that his kid was delusional enough to think that he had healing powers. John finding out about the visions had been bad enough. Somehow the other thing felt like an escalation. 

The choice ended up taken from him when the truck collided with the side of the Impala. The demon left the truck driver, who was distraught for all of ten seconds before he started choking up blood and collapsed, and Sam was left feeling dazed and stupid and—for the first time in a long time—exactly as young as Dean and John always treated him. He didn’t know what the hell he was supposed to do. 

So he tried to shake John awake, and when the headache hit he slid like an idiot out of the driver side door. He blinked hard to clear his vision and had an awful view of the fallen trucker, blood dribbling down his chin and—obscenely—clotting in his ugly mustache. Talking seemed beyond him, but he made an odd wheezing sound and reached out weakly towards Sam. Sudden panic gave Sam the strength to scramble away, to lever himself to his feet using the Impala’s door. The ground felt like it was wobbling underneath him like a sleazy motel waterbed, and it seemed like his stomach took the brunt of every lurch. He hadn’t eaten since before Yellow Eyes took John, but he still felt like he might full-on Linda Blair projectile vomit. But it didn’t matter as long as he could get to Dean.

Grimly, he forced himself to open the rear passenger door. Tried not to cringe when, deprived of its support, Dean just sort of hung limply, partway out the door, blood dripping feebly from the corner of his mouth. He hauled Dean up by his shoulders, felt for a pulse, and—

All the air went out of his lungs as his back hit the ground, and his head felt like it was in a vise, and through the blackness obscuring all but his peripheral vision he could only see the dirt, and the Impala’s wheels, and the trucker staring with eyes that had already gone dull. Dirt, wheels, dimming eyes, and then the trucker’s blood slowly seeping onto the dirt, and then the sound of the front passenger door opening, and John’s boots hitting the ground. Except it sounded like they kept hitting the ground over and over, even once the other passenger door opened and Dean and John both started talking. It wasn’t until Dean materialized over him that he realized the sound he’d mistaken for John’s footfalls was actually his own head hitting the ground repeatedly. Was it normal to be so conscious during a seizure?

Except maybe he wasn’t, because the next thing he knew he was in the backseat of the Impala, which had apparently miraculously shuddered to life, because they were back on the road. 

“You want to tell me what the hell happened back there?” John was saying to Dean. 

“Look, I don’t know much more than you do, okay?” Dean glanced back at Sam in what he probably thought was a subtle way. “Can we just talk about this later?” 

Later turned out to mean as soon as physically possible to bring something up again and be able to technically describe it as later. It didn’t even take five minutes after they booked a hotel room and Dean shut the door to the adjoining suite where he’d parked Sam that the argument started. John was pissed that they’d kept this from him, as if they knew any more than he did at this point, and Dean was pissed that that was what John chose to be pissed about, and John was pissed that Dean was pissed that he was pissed, and Dean thought that John was just so pissed because he was still holding a grudge about Sam walking out on them, and John thought Dean only thought that because _Dean_ was still holding a grudge but didn’t want to admit it so projected it onto John, and on and on and on. 

It was almost surreal. Dean’d had his problems with John when they were growing up, but he hadn’t been prone to getting into screaming matches with him the way Sam had, nor had he possessed a predilection for grand dramatic gestures. He’d always just shut down when faced with confrontation, and when he was forced to intervene because John and Sam were getting too nasty, he’d had a truly impressive ability to almost completely avoid taking sides. 

He didn’t want to hear this shit. They were arguing about him, anyways. It should be him venting years of frustration over John’s parenting skills and defending Dean, not the other way around. 

But their voices were loud even through the protection of the door, and even the light leaking under the door sent pain knifing through his skull, and the pounding of his head was making it impossible to put together a rational thought, so he pressed the heels of his hands over his eyes and let himself try not to listen. 

When the yelling subsided and the door opened, he wasn’t surprised that Dean was the one who stayed while John left to cool off. Dean didn’t say anything, just supplied him with a blister pack of aspirin and a perspiring bottle of water and sat with him in the dark and quiet until the edges of the headache softened. 

~*~*~*~

They came up with a set of rules to try and avoid another disaster. No touching was the first and most important. It seemed that skin contact was necessary, but it was better to make it a habit than to risk slipping up. 

The second was no intentional healing, except in life or death situations. Which meant that this thing that was so hugely interrupting their lives was also having no real positive effect; comedically full of misfortune as their lives were, they still didn’t face life-threatening injuries every single day. Painful, inconvenient injuries, to be sure, but not necessarily anything to be worried about. So a lot of his time was spent sitting on his hands and trying to ignore what he always felt was a somewhat martyred silence from John and Dean. He’d rather have a headache for a day than let Dean hobble around on a sprained knee for a week, but Dean and John both steadfastly refused help, and if he so much as glanced at the injury in question, they’d start giving him a wider berth, like they were afraid he’d come after them like a hungry ghoul. As if he _would._

Forcing a selfless gesture on someone who didn’t want it was their modus operandi, not his. 

What they could all agree was bothersome was the fact that the YED-related powers seemed to get stronger with repeated use. And unlike Max, he didn’t seem able to turn them off. The visions were uncontrollable, and undeniably increasing in intensity and frequency, and their unspoken concern was that the same thing would happen to this healing thing. It was possible there had already been an escalation; there was a pretty big difference between healing Jess’s cut finger and healing a softball-sized hole in Dean’s chest, and between that and healing Dean’s demon-pulverized organs. Currently, if he accidentally touched someone, the worst that could happen is he’d heal their paper cuts. But he had to wonder what the limit was—what exactly counted as an injury, to start with. The last thing any of them needed was for him to melt his brain cleaning out Dean’s arteries every time a ghost threw them into a wall. 

And even though the incidents were increasing in power, it wasn’t getting any easier on him. Accidentally healing something as simple as bruised ribs still left him with a migraine, and anything bigger than that would put him flat on his back in the backseat of the Impala for the next day, trying not to hurl every time John tapped the brakes too hard or Dean turned the radio up just a bit too much. 

That was another problem. It was too easy to fall back into old patterns. Four years away from it all and he didn’t say a single word when John slid into the driver’s seat and Dean took shotgun, leaving him to fold himself into the backseat which had been getting cramped even before his body insisted on shooting up another couple of inches after he left for Stanford. 

The Impala was home, but it was rapidly growing symbolic of everything he’d run away for. Boundaries in the Impala were established on a moment to moment basis. You could fight, or sit in total isolation, or joke around, or—most rarely—talk about your feelings, or all four at once. But you never knew when the atmosphere would change. At Stanford, he could go to the library if he needed quiet. He could lock his door if he needed to be alone. He could tell Jess when he needed to talk, or head to the bar or a party if he needed to be around people. In the Impala, all of that depended on the needs of the passengers managing to converge. There were times when they had good talks there, and times when they sat in leaden silences so heavy that they stretched into the motel rooms they eventually sought refuge in. 

The third rule was an unspoken one. They didn’t talk about it. Not to each other, and certainly not to anyone outside of the family. 

~*~*~*~

While heading towards the Roadhouse, he fell asleep and had a vision of a man in Oklahoma killing a clerk and then himself. Except when he told Dean and John about it, John said it was probably too late to do anything about it and there was no sense turning around. 

John waited in the car while Dean and Sam got the info from Jo and Ash, which, after Ellen pulled the mom card on Jo in front of everyone, made it seem almost like he’d known what was coming and had sent them to the slaughter. 

Sam figured the mom card had worked up until the point they got to Philadelphia and found Jo already talking the landlord into letting her rent the apartment. Then he was impressed right up to the point when John closed the door to the haunted apartment and Dean got a call from Ellen. 

For a moment it was almost comedic. Jo was furiously instructing Dean to lie, and John was just furious, and Dean’s eyes were darting between them. He finally managed a weak lie; even without hearing Ellen’s side of the conversation, it was easy to see she didn’t buy it. Neither Jo nor John bought it either, but neither of them were more mad either. One more win for never picking a side. 

“We’re taking you back home,” John said as soon as Dean hung up. 

Dean started packing up their shit, but Jo just stood there staring incredulously at John. “You can’t just haul me home like a kid who tried to run away from home with a backpack full of peanut butter sandwiches. I’m an adult, and you’re not my dad.” 

“It’s not my decision. I won’t be dragged into whatever drama is going on between you and your mom. You have a problem, take it up with her.” 

“ _Drama_? If you try to drag me back to her, I’d say that’s involving yourself more than just stepping back and letting me solve this case.” 

“This is my case. I don’t have time to solve it and babysit you.”

“You wouldn’t even know about this case if it weren’t for me, and I don’t need a babysitter. I’m just trying to carry on my dad’s legacy. I have the right to choose that.” 

Dean was staring at a spot on the floor somewhere beyond her, and Sam wanted to say that no one _chose_ to become a hunter any more than you could choose to be possessed by a demon. Maybe some people deluded themselves into thinking they’d chosen it, and maybe not everyone was raised into it or forced into it at gunpoint, but hunters became hunters because something really bad happened to them. Jo hadn’t had it easy but she could still get out, have a normal life. Ellen had given her that much. Had given her more than John had ever given his sons. 

John looked suddenly old. Sam had seem him drunk, and ill, and injured, and exhausted beyond reason, but never so tired and defeated. “So this is about your dad’s legacy, for you?” 

Jo stood with her chin raised as John closed the distance between them, her defiant expression unwavering even as he bent to say something into her ear. But as he kept talking, her face fell. And it kept falling, until he seemed to have said his piece and, without so much as a glance at her or his sons, stepped back and turned to leave the room. 

They all followed, Dean carrying all their crap like he thought it might shield him from whatever emotional fallout was sure to arrive soon, Jo in a daze, and Sam biting back the urge to take potshots at John’s parenting skills and control issues. It wasn’t his fight. 

The drive was long and awkward and completely silent. Jo sat stiffly in the backseat next to Sam and Sam tried to take up as little space as possible—which was pretty fucking difficult, at his height—and to pretend that he didn’t feel more useless than ever. John and Dean seemed more than ever like a united front, the responsible adults shepherding around the stupid kids. Which normally would be bearable with someone else there to share the weight of the embarrassment, but Jo was closed-off, bordering on completely shut-down, and she knew more than he did, anyways. 

When they pulled up to the Roadhouse, Jo sprang out of the car before they’d even fully stopped, and Dean and Sam ended up having to be the ones to go in and apologize to Ellen while John waited in the Impala. 

Jo was saying something to Ellen in a low voice when they walked in, and when Ellen just shook her head in response Jo was gone out the back of the Roadhouse. 

Eight hours ago he’d actually been jealous of her, and somewhat resentful that she’d so casually dropped out of college to entertain aspirations of hunting when he’d do just about anything if he could just go back. Now she just seemed like another hunter’s kid torn between being normal and going into the family business, the will to do either draining away with every unearthing of another family secret. Faded hand-me-down flannel and threadbare jeans, skills and knowledge she’d been taught but urged to never ever ever ever use, never knowing if her dad would come home until one day she knew he wouldn’t and wished she didn’t. Never knowing if it was worse to spit on his life’s work by making her own way, or to follow in his footsteps.

“Tell your father to just come in next time,” Ellen said when, after giving up on the awkward exchange, Dean went to open the door. 

“He figured you wouldn’t want to see him,” Dean said cautiously. 

“The damage has already been done,” she said. “We don’t have time anymore for this middle school crap.”

“What the hell did you tell her, anyways?” Sam asked John after Dean had relayed Ellen’s message. Dean cast him a reproachful glance. 

But John met his eyes through the rearview mirror. “Nothing that wasn’t true.” 

When they drove off, Sam could see Jo still standing in the field behind the Roadhouse, her back to them, half-bent over with her hands braced against her thighs as if she was trying not to puke or pass out or both. Once the Impala had taken them far enough away that Jo was barely a pinprick, he thought he saw Ellen go out to join her.

~*~*~*~

A couple of days after they brought Jo back to Ellen, he had a dream where a woman stood on the side of a bridge in a slip too much like the one Jess had been wearing. Except instead of a fiery death, this woman was staring down a watery one. She was crying, and might have appeared suicidal to passerby, but he knew in the dream that she didn’t want to jump. She was being forced to. He kept waiting for her to think something useful, to look at her attacker or anything, but all she was thinking about was that she wanted to go home, and that she was cold, and that she hoped they pulled her body out of the river before she got too waterlogged so that when they made her mom identify her body it wasn’t more painful than it had to be. The concrete scraped up her bare feet, but she missed it desperately as she stepped off of it and felt only air against the soles of them. Her stomach dropped and kept dropping, and her hair blew across her face so that she couldn’t see and she wanted to go _home_ and—

Sam woke up on the ground next to the foldout couch in their motel room, coughing as if he’d been the one whose lungs were filling with water, a mild (compared to the healing-induced ones, anyways) but insistent headache cheerily taking up residence behind his eyes. 

“Nightmare?” Dean blearily asked from one of the beds. It was unseasonably cold, and his face was barely visible through the nest he’d made of the duvet. 

“Normal one,” Sam lied. 

“You okay?” Dean asked, but he was already falling back asleep. 

There was no point telling the truth about it until morning. They couldn’t go anywhere until John had slept off the worst of the booze he’d been self-medicating with ever since they dropped Jo off at the Roadhouse. 

Instead he showered and got dressed and started tidying up the motel room as quietly as possible, for Dean’s sake if not for John’s. 

He found the town the girl was in, and didn’t see any stories about missing girls—at least, missing girls fitting her description—or dead girls pulled out of rivers. But he did find a story about a doctor who, having never before picked up a gun in his life, walked into a store to buy one and opened fire. 

No more ignoring the vision shit. He’d bring it up in the morning and if John tried to veto it, he’d just go on his own. Wouldn’t be the first time he’d walked out. 

Except when he brought it up, there was no argument from either of them. 

~*~*~*~

Guthrie wasn’t right when they arrived. It was just a little too quiet, the people there just a little too wary of strangers. Too many of the cars they passed on their way in were full of luggage and boxes and people with pinched faces. 

There was no one manning the morgue or the police station; John took the station and Dean and Sam walked right into the morgue. 

The woman from his vision was there. Besides the fact that she’d drowned and he’d seen it happen before it actually happened, there was nothing indicating that there was anything supernatural about her death. Hell, for all he knew there really wasn’t. Maybe the visions were just escalating, and he was starting to tune into random tragedies.

He could tell Dean was starting to wonder the same thing. 

The fear remained even once it turned out that the woman _had_ been killed by someone else with powers, though not the one they met. They found Andrew Gallagher stoned out of his mind in a van with a stupid mural on the side, and from what he told them Sam gathered that the doctor (among others) had been killed by Andy’s brother, and that Andy had somehow managed to kill him, too. And clearly, was only dealing with it by heavily self-medicating. 

There was something dead about Andy’s eyes and he wanted desperately to stay, to try and talk Andy down off the ledge like he had’t been able to talk Max down, but Andy ordered John and Dean to get out of town and leave him alone, and even though his ability didn’t seem to work on Sam, he had no real choice but to follow them. Like always. 

He managed to keep his mouth shut until they were back out on the interstate and the worst of the compulsion seemed to have faded, at which point it came bursting out unbidden, like he’d been the one under some kind of compulsion. “We could have stopped it.” 

Dean had on his trying-too-hard-to-be-mad-because-otherwise-I’ll-feel-guilty-and-won’t-be-able-to-handle-it face, but John was just… inaccessible. Not shut down but definitely not open for business. 

“We can’t trust the visions,” Dean said finally, cautiously. Which was a John Winchester approved answer if Sam ever heard one. 

“They’ve been right every time so far.” 

“They’re related to the demon. It could be lulling us into thinking they’re helpful so that it can use them to lead us into a trap later on.” 

“Or the demon has no control over them, and by ignoring them we’re letting people die for no reason.” 

“It’s for a good reason,” John said. “It works in the demon’s benefit whether or not it’s pulling the strings. If it controls them, it can send us into a trap. If it doesn’t, it’s still putting us more at risk than we would be without them.” 

“So that’s it, then.” He wanted to say that it was completely absurd for their relationship to be like this, after years spent apart. It seemed like they should have learned something from what had happened before he went to Stanford but it was like nothing had happened. Like he’d been some stupid kid throwing a tantrum, and now that he was safely back under control there was no reason to acknowledge it had happened. Just sweep it under the rug and go back to business as usual. 

Which he knew was the most uncharitable possible interpretation of the behavior, but he would’t know the real reasoning until someone just _said_ something. 

Dean turned up the radio a few passive aggressive dials. 

~*~*~*~

Being possessed was almost like being asleep. There were times when he was blacked out, and times when he was aware of what was happening only in the hazy sense of awareness of a badly controlled lucid dream. He hated it most when he was completely aware of what Meg was using his body to do, but completely unable to stop it. 

What was almost as bad was when he could feel her rifling through his memories like his brain was no more complex than a filing cabinet. It usually didn’t seem like Meg was being nosy on purpose, just that it was a side effect of possession. Sort of like she absorbed his memories through osmosis whether or not she tried to, and she decided to use them against him, since she had to have them anyways. He wondered at one point if demons were stuck learning whatever useless crap their host knew, from when their goldfish’s last bowel movement was to what happened on last week’s episode of The Simple Life. Meg had sourly informed him that the answer wasn’t no.

She was less sour when she told him stories about his own life. She brought up everything from mildly embarrassing situations (which she twisted into cinematic humiliations that made Carrie White’s highlight reel look about as distressing as your average episode of Nigella’s Kitchen) to long-buried hurts to pain he hadn’t even remembered until she took up residence in his brain. It was in gloating tones that she reminded him of every insensitive thing he’d ever said, of every time he’d been arguing with Dad or Dean or Jess and had crossed the line and seen the anger in their eyes shift to genuine pain. Even memories where he thought he’d been clearly in the right weren’t safe; she managed to spin his flight to Stanford after Dad’s ultimatum into a tantrum, his discontentment with the way he and Dean had been raised into the resentment of a spoiled child. 

By the time he finally vomited her up, he felt raw and hollowed out, a feeling that wasn’t alleviated when, as soon as the last oily dregs of her had vanished back to hell, he violently coughed up water until he actually vomited. Meg had apparently been a fan of tequila and pizza rolls. He sincerely hoped, for her sake, that they’d tasted better going down than they had coming up.

He was sitting in a mildewed bathtub in a dingy motel bathroom, tub filled with what he assumed was holy water, and everything smelled of sulfur and blood and sweat under the tequila-and-pizza-roll puke and he felt like if something didn’t happen soon he’d crawl right out of his skin—if the holy water soaked shirt he was wearing didn’t shrink wrap him into it, anyways. 

Dean was hovering awkwardly, the blood slowly seeping through a crappy patch job on his shoulder making it obvious why he was reluctant to risk touching him. John was watching Dean hovering the way you might watch someone who’s threatening to grab hold of a live wire. He hated himself that it was his fault their relationship was like this—that Dean, who languished when cut off from his family, had been forced to bar himself from physical contact. It wasn’t that they were a particularly touchy-feely family (and Dean would have a few choice words for anyone who accused him of it) but the contact that did occur was important.

Hated himself more for not being able to hate himself enough for it. With Meg gone and his head feeling roughly the same as his tequila-ravaged stomach, he wasn’t sure what it would do to him if his stupid fucked up brain forced him to heal someone. 

In the end, John was the one to hand him a bottle of water (careful not to let their fingers brush) and clap him on the shoulder—a thin, meager gesture that nonetheless felt as skin-crawlingly intimate as a hug. 

~*~*~*~

He knew it was just because of Meg, and because of the visions and healing, but it still stung when, as they investigated a college campus where a professor had supposedly thrown himself out of a haunted building’s fourth story window, neither of them seemed able to stop casting glances at him. As if, after everything they’d been through and everything they were still going through, he was going to bolt to the library and disappear into the shelves, never to be seen again. 

Of course, that’s where they ended up parking him anyways after they talked to the janitor and checked out the building where the professor took a swan dive. It was like being fourteen again, sitting at a table in a library that he didn’t really belong in, books stacked up so high that if he arranged them right he could wall himself off from the world. Dean and John off risking their asses, not caring how he’d feel if anything happened to them. How he’d feel if his freedom came at such a steep price. 

Granted, there wasn’t much that was dangerous about running recon on a college campus. Dean was probably halfway to drunk before Sam had finished skimming through the second book. 

But still. 

Dean dropped in when Sam was halfway through the tenth book.

“Well,” Dean said as he approached, loudly enough that he got a dirty look from one of the few actual students studying nearby. “Bar was a bust, but a girl there gave me the number of a sorority sister who might know something. We’re gonna meet up later tonight back at the bar.” 

“You’re blocking the light,” Sam said. 

It had come out bitchier than he meant it to, but it must have caught Dean off guard because he graciously stepped aside and started leafing through one of the books in Sam’s reject pile. 

“Djinn, huh?” Dean asked, without much interest. 

“I don’t really think that’s what we’re looking at, but I figured it was worth checking just in case.”

“Yeah, good thinking. Kind of does seem like it gives people what they want and then twists it, right? Creepy professor’s boning the co-eds so one falls right into his lap, and then he falls right out the window. Wonder if these things ever just give someone what they want with no strings.” 

“Why bother wishing? You already have exactly what you want.” Which _really_ came out bitchier than he wanted, and this time Dean didn’t seem to be feeling quite so magnanimous.

Dean set down the book he’d been half-heartedly flipping through and asked, in his best I’m-magnanimously-giving-you-the-benefit-of-the-doubt-but-I-know-exactly-where-this-is-going voice, “What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“I mean, this is pretty much your deepest fantasy come to life, isn’t it? I’m finally fucked up enough to probably need you permanently, and finally… finally contaminated enough that you know I won’t inflict myself on anyone else.” 

Dean looked like he’d just stabbed him in the gut. “You don’t mean that.” 

“Don’t try to handle me. You act all martyred but you’re just like Dad; you weren’t upset that I left you, you were just upset that you couldn’t control me anymore.”

“ _I’m_ just like Dad? Which one of us freaks the fuck out whenever they lose the slightest ounce of control? Which one of us is just coming off a four year tantrum? Which one just cannot wait for the first opportunity to run away from the family? Which one thinks it’s okay to lie and hide things so long as you say it’s for our own good? Sure, Dad’s head is pretty far up his own ass sometimes, but at least he knows it. You haven’t come up for air in years.” 

“How would you know? You haven’t taken your head out of his since we were kids. And where is he, anyways?”

“He’s researching, like you’re supposed to be.” 

“He bailed, Dean. He sat us both at the kiddie table so we don’t get in his way while he works on his fucking mission. This is busy work.” At some point they’d gotten way too close to each other, and he could see with disgusting clarity every inch of the infuriating expression on Dean’s face. 

In the end, he couldn’t remember which one of them threw the first punch. Didn’t know if Dean remembered, either. All he knew was that, when the janitor walked by and remarked that he must have missed the part in the parable where the prodigal son kicked his brother in the crotch, the worst of the anger drained away and they let each other go. He was left feeling like such an idiot; they’d been fighting like they were kids again, not like adults capable of reason and discussing their emotions like actual human beings. 

It was just because of the Trickster. 

That thought wasn’t much of a comfort after John told them he’d figured it out and that they needed to pull their heads out of their asses and fall in line, or after they staked the janitor, or on the drive out of Ohio. The silence between him and Dean was so heavy that even John seemed a little uncomfortable.

But that apparently wasn’t enough for him to say anything about it. 

~*~*~*~

He hadn’t really expected to be able to heal lycanthropy. As far as he was aware, he’d never actually cured an illness, and Madison had already transformed and killed, so conventional logic dictated that if it could ever have been cured, it was long past that point. 

There was no emetic headache, no gross nosebleed. Just the hope slowly slipping off Madison’s face, her huge dark eyes turning huger and sadder, and the revolting sensation that something was churning beneath her skin. 

When the time came, Madison grabbed the barrel of the gun and pulled until it was flush against her chest, but she was holding it tighter than he was. 

It took him a minute to realize what had happened when the blood suddenly splattered on his face. Horribly, his first stupid thought was that ever since Dean dragged him away from Stanford, his life had turned into a nonstop horror movie. 

His second thought, which came once Madison—blood bubbling up out of her mouth and running down her chin, expression of relief lingering in her eyes even as her gaze went dull and fixed—fell forward into his arms, was that this was just one more choice that had been taken from him.

It wasn’t until his third thought that he finally thought she had deserved better. 

He was such an asshole. 

And John was just standing there like he actually thought he’d done Sam a favor. Just this fucking infuriating _I-knew-you-weren’t-going-to-do-what-needed-to-be-done_ expression on his face. Sam didn’t know if it would have been worse if John was doing it because he thought Sam was weak, or if he was doing it out of some piss-poor attempt at fatherly affection. 

Either way, the result was the same. They’d failed Madison so soundly that even her last wish had gone unfulfilled. 

So much for saving people. 

~*~*~*~

Waking up in Cold Oak somehow didn’t come as a surprise. It felt strangely inevitable, like whatever was going to happen had to happen in some form no matter how anyone tried to avoid getting there. 

Andy and Ava he already knew, which made him feel somewhat like he’d personally made things harder on them, because Andy and Ava’s eyes were significantly deader than Lily and Jake’s. Ava just had the visions, so she wasn’t any more useful than Sam, and Andy’s powers wouldn’t help if they were up against a demon. Jake could shock things by touching them, which was (perhaps perversely) a comfort, and Lily was telekinetic. 

Not that it mattered, because Lily tried to leave and, before Ava could retrieve her, ended up falling into a pit trap and breaking her neck. 

Andy made an attempt to send a message to Dean, and then they all settled in to try and brace themselves for what was coming. 

Years of waiting alone in a motel room for John and Dean to finish a hunt (never knowing when they’d get unlucky and never make it home) enabled Sam to fall asleep eventually. Yellow Eyes showed up to show him what supposedly happened to Mary the night of the fire, and he woke up feeling sick with dread. Not just the general existential dread of finally knowing for certain that he was unclean and had been contaminated for so long that he had no way to really scrub himself clean (though there was a fair measure of that), but dread that something was going to happen, that something had happened. Andy and Ava were supposed to be on watch for demons, but one of them should have been back already. He got up, leaving Jake still asleep, and went to go check.

It still somehow came as a surprise when he saw Andy lying gutted on the ground. 

~*~*~*~

He crouched next to Andy, trying to focus on the blood soaking his shirt instead of on his fixed expression because—just because. Reached out to feel for a pulse even though John had made sure he’d seen enough death to _know_ , because what if?

The headache hit him like a mack truck and he thought, as he landed gracelessly on his face next to Andy, that it was a little perverse that blinding migraines were a relief now. Then his vision was obscured by blood instead of black spots, and he realized what had actually happened. He peered up as high as his head would let him and saw, through the blood he was blinking away with limited success, Ava standing there holding a small kitchen knife. 

“You were lying the whole time,” he said thickly, belatedly realizing that the blow that split open his temple had also set his nose to bleeding. The salt line hadn’t been broken. He should have noticed that. 

She huffed a slightly pitying laugh. “Clearly.”

“I just—what happened to you?“ 

She helpfully kicked him in the ribs to flip him onto his back before she crouched down next to him. “My group realized pretty quick why they’d brought us here. It’s demon battle royale. The super strength made it go faster, but I would have done what I had to do either way. It was almost easy. Most people didn’t even realize what was really happening.” 

“You found it easy to kill people,” Sam said flatly. 

“Not at first. But it’s who we are.”

“It’s not who I am.” 

“That’s a very noble thought, but we don’t get to choose.” 

He managed to heave himself up onto his elbows and wipe some of the blood out of his eyes. “Demons lie, Ava. Whatever he told you, it’s not true. Or if it is, he twisted it, made it into something worse than it really is. We could all walk away from this.” 

The triumph was starting to drain out of her expression, slowly being replaced by anger. “I’ve been stuck here five months, Sam. You don’t even know everything I’ve done and you’re looking at me like I’m Freddy Krueger. I couldn’t go back even if I wanted to. I did what I had to do to survive. Same as you would have.” 

Same as he still might, she didn’t add, but he knew she was thinking it from the way she kept rolling the hilt of her knife in her palm, even though her elbows were still resting comfortably enough against her legs. 

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’d rather be dead.” 

“No. No, I do think so.” She tilted her head and smiled cheerlessly. “Like mother, like son, right?” She waited a few seconds for it to sink into his slightly-concussed brain before adding, “We weren’t just chosen. We were paid for. Years before we were born, our moms wanted something really, really bad. So he offered to give it to them, and they wouldn’t even have to pay until ten years later, and it wouldn’t even be them that paid. Not directly, anyways. My mom wanted a million bucks. I’m not even joking; she made it big. She goes to that political commentator's key parties now. Wonder what yours wanted.” 

His nausea wasn’t just from the head trauma anymore. 

Mary wasn’t stupid. She had to have figured out what the demon was really after as soon as she found out she was pregnant with him, even if she couldn’t know the finer details. 

Heavy-booted footsteps passed by the house, and Ava clapped a hand over his mouth, though he hadn’t been planning on calling out. The blood on her hands— _Andy’s_ blood and he couldn’t think about that, not if he wanted to get out of this alive—smelled nauseatingly strong, metallic like a cheap copper ring coaxed out of a bulk vending machine, and he could feel her pulse through her wrist, slightly too fast to seem truly calm. 

“What exactly is the plan here?” he asked as soon as she drew her hand back. “Why not just kill me and get it over with?” 

She studied him for a long moment. “Maybe I thought you’d understand. Or that you deserved an explanation.”

“Andy and Lily didn’t?” 

“You’ve been trying to figure all this out way longer than them. It means more to you.” She turned suddenly, cursed, and stomped on his stomach before backing around a corner so she wouldn’t be visible from the doorway.

He was still struggling to get his breath back when Jake’s footsteps came back. Didn’t have enough oxygen to get the warning out before Jake was too far into the house, before he got distracted by Andy’s body and Sam, before Ava reappeared and effortlessly snapped Jake’s neck. 

But Jake’s hand had been on Sam’s throat, feeling for a pulse, and by the time Ava stepped back, thinking her work finished, Jake was back on his feet, his spine whole. 

Ava swore again, voice cracking this time.

Sam had time to rasp, “Jake, it was her,” before he had to roll himself over to vomit, vision peppered by so many black spots that he didn’t even see what happened. Just heard bones cracking whenever Ava got a hit in, and Ava squealing whenever Jake tried to fry her. 

By the time he’d pulled himself together, blinking hard through the blinding headache, every breath feeling like his stomach was full of broken glass, neither of them were looking so good. Jake was hunched over what were probably broken ribs, limping on a break in his leg, and holding one arm gingerly against his chest. Ava was covered in burns, actually charred in some places, skin grayish with encroaching shock in the places where it was still unmarred. They were too evenly matched and not resilient enough. They’d break each other to pieces unless something changed. 

It’d been a long time since he felt so helpless. He couldn’t lay a hand on Ava without healing her and giving her back the advantage, and he didn’t know what it would do to him to purposefully heal Jake. Vomiting had left the taste of blood in his mouth more than it had left the taste of bile, and he could feel blood dripping thickly out of his nose and making its way down his chin. 

All he ended up doing was staggering to his feet like an idiot. Jake turned automatically to look at him—

—And Ava drove her knife to the hilt into his gut, wrenching it up through his chest cavity, cutting through his ribs and sternum and up into his shoulder, seemingly as easily as if she were cutting through butter. His guts spilled out and splattered wetly onto the dirty floor. 

Sam bolted and lurched through the front door, trying desperately to stay upright despite the world’s incessant spinning. If he fell, he wouldn’t get back up again. Maybe wouldn’t even if Ava dropped dead before she could get to him. He wobbled down the dirt road out of town more than he ran down it, and it was probably only her own injuries that kept her from catching up with him. If she didn’t get treatment soon, she’d succumb to shock.

“It’s like Highlander, Sammy,” she called raggedly. Her usage of the nickname made his skin crawl. “We didn’t ask for this, but it’s the way it has to be.” 

He thought he was hallucinating when he saw the two figures on the horizon, too far away to recognize but too familiar not to. 

Then he heard one of them call his name, the voice Dean’s frayed with worry and sleeplessness and drink, and the relief was so palpable that what strength was left in his legs faded and he slowed. 

An instant later, he felt Ava stagger into him and brace her hand against his shoulder. He tried to shake her off but her strength hadn’t waned even if her life really was ebbing away, so all he succeeded in doing was twisting himself around so that they were facing each other, and as he saw in his peripheral vision the figures break into a run he felt her sink the knife into his stomach.

She had time to twist the knife and slice her way up through two of his ribs, her eyes huge and luminous in her singed and now-pallid face, her expression a depressing mixture of triumph and disgust and shame and pleasure and dread, before they shot her down. 

Ears ringing, he fell too. 

It seemed like he closed his eyes for just a second, but when he opened them again Dean and John had closed the distance between them. 

Dean started to haul him up to see how bad it was, only to flinch and drop him when John emptied his gun into Ava’s head. 

Hitting the ground again made him cough, which sent a weak spray of blood across Dean’s shoes. “Sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay,” Dean said. “It’s gonna be okay. Just let me…” He peeled Sam’s jacket aside to look at the damage, and his face fell. “It’s not that bad,” he said unconvincingly. 

“Let me see,” John said brusquely, shoving Dean aside carelessly enough that if there had been enough air in Sam’s lungs, he’d be making a bitchy comment about it. 

He didn’t see if John managed to hide the truth better than Dean did, because against his will his gaze drifted over to Ava’s body lying a few feet away. Half her face looked like ground meat and the other half was frozen in her awful final expression. Her intact eye was wide and glassy, and blood was matting her hair and drenching her clothes and pooling beneath her. She was still clutching the knife in one blood-slicked hand. His thoughts wandered to her engagement ring lying abandoned by her fiancé’s mangled body. 

They needed to go back and get the bodies. At least give Lily and Andy and Jake a hunter’s funeral. They deserved that much, at least. They—

He was dragged rudely back to the present when John took off his own jacket and pressed it hard against the stab wound. As much as you could apply pressure to a wound that was splitting someone open like a gutted trout, anyways. In the moment, he was almost grateful that he hadn’t gotten a proper lungful of air since Ava’s boot met his sternum; he just sort of wheezed even though all he wanted to do was to yell every cruel thing he’d ever thought about John. 

“Fuck,” he managed once the new pain of the pressure had faded into the background with the rest of it. “Not even a point to it.” 

“Shut up,” Dean said. “Of course there’s a point. You’re not going to die because some chick a foot shorter than you gave you a papercut. That’s not how this ends.” 

Except maybe it had to be like this. Maybe if the three of them were together it would just slowly kill all three of them, and maybe if it was just Dean and Sam they’d slowly grow to resent each other even as they lost the ability to survive on their own. Or one of them would go to a crossroads demon. It went without saying that John and Sam couldn’t function if it was just the two of them, and Dean and John had already proven that they could go on just fine without Sam. 

This was the best case scenario. The world would keep on spinning. They might not be happy about it, but at least they wouldn’t be in hell. He wasn’t dumb enough to think his death would neatly solve all their problems, but neither was his narcissistic enough to think that it was something they could never recover from. It’d be okay. 

One of them slapped him and his vision mostly cleared. He wasn’t on the dirt road in Cold Oak anymore; he was in the backseat of the Impala, John driving and Dean squeezed in next to Sam in a way that definitely wouldn’t endear them to any cops should they get pulled over. 

“We’re a half hour from a hospital,” Dean said. “Gonna patch you up.” 

“You can’t patch this up,” Sam said. His mouth still tasted like blood and it wasn’t just from the fresh nosebleed he could feel starting. As if he didn’t look enough like a freak. 

John glanced back and Sam knew he knew it was true. 

“It’ll be okay,” Sam said. “It’s okay, really.” He didn’t know what else to say. Saying that things were better this way would just make Dean think he’d let himself die out of—obligation, or guilt, and that would just make him more miserable than he had to be. He tried to grab Dean’s hand, like if he could just hold onto him Dean could absorb the truth by osmosis, but he just ended up clutching his sleeve, like a kid. 

Dean grabbed his hand for him, using his other sleeve to mop up some of the fallout from the nosebleed. Still treating him like he was a stupid kid.

“You need to let me go,” Sam told him. Just—was it so much to ask to be trusted, just this once?

But he was drifting, couldn’t seem to get enough oxygen to his brain to find the words to make them understand. 

“Just shut up,” Dean said. 

So Sam shut up, and clutched Dean’s hand even though he couldn’t really feel it anymore, and looked up towards the rearview mirror to see John’s face.

For the first time in months, his head didn’t hurt.


End file.
